What memories I have on a 608. I was in high school and happened to
> find a newspaper ad for a telephone operator in a large city hospital.
> Since I had always been fascinated with switchboards and telephone
> equipment this was a job that I had to have. I was only 16 and this > was 1979.
Thanks for the report.
Did you have any trouble getting the job because of your youth or gender, especially in a large installation?
Around 1973-74 the Bell System and employers slowly began to accept the idea of male switchboard operators. Before that it was strictly a female job. The only exceptions were rough environments, such as a police station or waterfront warehouse. I think the boys hired then were ex-military with signal corps experience.
There were boys from an all-boys high school who were interested in such jobs (they learned on their school's 555 PBX) but in those days found a brick wall because of age and gender. Most companies -- large and small -- took their PBX jobs very seriously. Big companies wouldn't break with tradition. Small companies wanted a girl since receptionist type jobs were women. Young people weren't perceived as being responsible enough for a large board, although they could get jobs in very small places, where perhaps working the switchboard was only part of the duties.
We also learned that we could take a front cord and connect it to an
> extension jack then depress the "ring front" key and we could almost > press out a tune.
> I could go on and on. I miss that service and the days of
> switchboards. I was lucky, even then that 608 was considered very
> dated but since we had it doing very advanced things (tandem lines,
> long distance billing, conference calls) the powers that were decided
> that the 608 was the only acceptable board for us until 1983.
I would not call the 608 "dated", it was the most advanced cord board the Bell System offered. There were plenty of older models in service in those years. I think what killed the cord board was economics--the cost of purchasing and maintaining electronics -- like the Dimension PBX -- came down enough that they were competitive with cord boards. With all its automation, I don't think the 608 was cheap.
A big disadvantage of cord boards was that they required two operations per call while a console required only one. With cord boards, you had to pull the cords down at the end of the call, a console disconnected automatically.
If your employer was a large organization, it probably went Centrex which eliminated a lot of traffic.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But before female operators there were men (mostly young boys) doing it. I am referring to the 1880-1900 era. Bell got rid of the young guys because they said the customers complained that the younger guys were rude and crude. PAT]